1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to business method performance monitoring and analysis and, more particularly, provides models, technologies and tools to maintain all possible relationships between business metrics, and exploit these relationships for business analysis.
2. Background Description
An often-quoted axiom says, “You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” This is also true for business. Nowadays, enterprises have realized that monitoring business performance in a continuously manner is crucial to achieve operational excellence, and to better align daily operations with long-term business strategies.
An enterprise executes various business processes in its every day operations. These processes often span several functional units within the enterprise, sometimes even extend to link with partners' processes; they usually involve many employee roles, assets, and resources; they may be supported by Information Technology (IT) systems, or be executed in ad hoc manner by humans manually. To monitor enterprise-wide business performance, we need to continuously collect metric data from these business processes, aggregate the lower-level operational metrics to build higher-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).